Save the Fox, Kill the Fetus

Question: Why do babies in the womb have fewer rights than vermin? Answer: Because men can buy Viagra over the counter. Yes, this sounds at best like a piece of muddled confusion, but welcome to the world of left-wing thinking, where logic is irrelevant and morality is a mélange of whatever suits the progressive palate. Let me explain. This particular assault on clarity and coherence is provided courtesy of Ruth Coppinger, a politician in the Republic of Ireland. Her current passion is the abolition of the mandatory seventy-two-hour cooling-off period currently required before proceeding with an abortion: “[Such a time delay] does not apply to any other medical procedure that we have in law. . . . One can buy Viagra over the counter. . . . One can have a rhinoplasty procedure performed and there is no mandatory wait. The regret rate for rhinoplasty is 40 percent.”

Democratic politics relies on persuasion, but persuasion is an art. It depends upon using arguments, language, and analogies that resonate with the intuitions of the culture. And so the statement by Coppinger reveals something deep about those intuitions as they now exist in a land that, within living memory, was a stronghold of religious conservatism. The game now, it seems, is to oppose and erase any vestige that such a stronghold ever existed. Supporting the destruction of those who bear the divine image is, of course, the most dramatic way of doing this.

Coppinger’s reference to Viagra might seem at first glance gratuitous, but it goes to the heart of the therapeutic anthropology that underlies the decadence of the West and serves to make access to abortion something desirable. The loss of sex drive that naturally accompanies aging in men is a problem to be overcome, for to be sexually inactive is to be less than fulfilled as a human being. The same applies to pregnancy. To have the recreational, cost-free nature of sex disrupted by pesky physical consequences (accidental side-effects?) is to inhibit sexual activity. The body’s natural sexual functioning must be overcome. 

The comparison with rhinoplasty would be amusing if it were not so chilling. To be able to draw a plausible comparison between the termination of a pregnancy and a nose job indicates the trivial status now ascribed to the former. And notice the role of regret here. The moral register of the two actions is therapeutic, determined by the emotions experienced in the aftermath of the procedures. 

And, of course, the sexism card is played. The delay, Coppinger says, apparently assumes that “women are rash, emotional, cannot make decisions for themselves and have not fully thought things through and that by putting in this place this barrier they will suddenly decide not to go ahead with a termination.” In fact, all human beings are subject to making intemperate and premature decisions; laws with regard to pregnancy impact women because only they can become pregnant. On that, Coppinger and I are apparently in agreement. In today’s world, that makes us both vulnerable to accusations of transphobia and calls into question her own previous support for men claiming the right to usurp women’s identity. Where we differ is whether the inconvenience of a day off work or imposing on a friend for another ride to the clinic overrides deeper moral questions concerning the decision to make sure that a human being never has a chance at life. Only if that human being has already been trivialized in the culture at large to the level of just another routine medical inconvenience is it then possible to make such an argument. 

As for babies in the womb being lower than vermin in Coppinger’s moral hierarchy, she is also, with tedious predictability, an outspoken opponent of fox hunting. Some lives matter, it seems, just not those of human beings in the womb. Her commitments, from her flip-flop on women to her war against the womb to her impassioned concern for foxes, reflect the usual concatenation of contemporary progressive tastes, with little or no concern for consistency. The lives of foxes are worth saving. The contents of the womb are just a medical problem to be eliminated.

And that points to yet another problem: Once an arbitrary definition is made of when human beings qualify for life, the weakest and most vulnerable in society—not just in the woman’s womb but eventually this side of the birth canal—become yet weaker and more vulnerable still. Peter Singer and Eric Cohen, on opposite sides of the abortion and infanticide debates, have both pointed this out. But hey, you can buy Viagra over the counter, so why not euthanize those who have, as an earlier regime that despised such once proclaimed, “Dasein ohne Leben”—“existence without life.” Just don’t apply that to foxes.

Image by Neil McIntosh, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.